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Initially, a number of stimulus cards are presented to the participant. The participant is not told how to match the cards; however, he or she is told whether a particular match is right or wrong. The mistakes made during this learning process, are analyzed to arrive at a score.

The original WCST used paper cards and was carried out with the experimenter on one side of the desk facing the participant on the other.[1] Since the early 1990s, however, computerized versions of the task have been available, the most recent version being the Microsoft Windows-compatible version 4.0.[2] The latter has the advantage of automatically scoring the test, which was quite complex in the manual version. The test takes approximately 12-20 minutes to carry out and generates a number of psychometric scores, including numbers, percentages, and percentiles of: categories achieved, trials, errors, and perseverative errors.

The WCST has been used in neuroimaging paradigms such as PET and fMRI. As predicted by the acquired brain injury literature, early PET studies have shown the task involves significant activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.[5][6]. However, more recent fMRI studies have shown that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (Konishi et al., 1998, Nature Neuroscience) together with the caudate nucleus (Monchi et al., 2001, J. Neuroscience) may be the regions most important for the set-shifting process required in the WCST. The test's use in neurodegenerative diseases such as motor neurone disease has identified at least a subgroup of these patients for whom there is some subtle degree of cognitive dysfunction, in contrast to the traditional view that these were pure disorders of the motor system.

The trademark "Wisconsin Card Sorting Test" was registered in the year 2000 with the United States patent and Trademark Office (Reg. #2320931, Ser # 75-588988) by Wells Printing and Digital Services of Madison, Wisconsin. Although filed in 1998, the trademark application states the mark has been in use in commerce since at least 1970. The trademark covers "psychological testing materials, namely printed tests, printed cards, and printed instruction manuals in the field of psychological evaluation." This trademark does not cover the computer implementation of the test, distributed by PAR Inc., sometimes referred to as simply WCST.